


After the Breath Has Gone

by emynii, ObliObla



Series: Nia & Obli's Whumptober 2019 [19]
Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Gen, Hell, Lucifer Bingo 2019 (Lucifer TV), No Smut, Torture, Whumptober 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-20
Updated: 2019-10-20
Packaged: 2020-12-27 00:21:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21109613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emynii/pseuds/emynii, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ObliObla/pseuds/ObliObla
Summary: It was just a dream; it had to be. Because if it wasn't a dream, then...then... Oh,god.For the Whumptober prompt: asphyxiationFor the Lucifer Bingo prompt: Lent





	After the Breath Has Gone

**Author's Note:**

> Additional warnings are in the end notes.
> 
> Thanks to [DifferenceEngineGIrl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DifferenceEngineGirl/pseuds/DifferenceEngineGirl) for helping with the tagging.
> 
> “The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names.”  
—Neil Gaiman, Coraline
> 
> “We make choices. No one else can live our lives for us. And we must confront and accept the consequences of our actions.”  
—Neil Gaiman, The Kindly Ones

The man was in an empty room—floors, walls, and ceiling gray and featureless—lit by a sourceless light, equally dull and dim. He was naked, curled into a ball in the center, but, with a shudder, he rose to sit, arms wrapped tight around his knees. He looked around, but there was nothing else to look at, nothing more to see. He leaned forward and stood, shakily, feeling the strangely unidentifiable texture of the ground beneath his feet. It was neither hard nor soft, neither hot nor cold.

So, too, was this place neither hot nor cold. The air was as still as the moments before a storm, but it smelled not of ozone, nor of rain. Not smoke nor freshly turned earth. Not the softness of clean linens or the stench of unwashed human. No, it was as indistinct as what he could see, as what he could feel, as the flatness of it all on his tongue.

There was no sound, either. Not even the beating of his heart in his chest, the whisper of breath leaving his chapped lips, the rumble of digestion or simply the flow of blood in his veins.

There was nothing.

There was nothing for a time both fleeting and eternal—no darkness, no true light. He paced the confines of the room, wading through an indistinct soup as he went, painting the walls with touch he couldn’t entirely feel. Less surface than a bare tingling that numbed his mind and soul, it was still the only sensation he was allowed. He had tried so long ago—or was it mere seconds ago—to coax pleasure from his flesh, but he found he could feel his own touch no more than the contact with the walls and floor. Then, he had tried pain, but even that was dulled and nebulous.

No blood would fall, no sweat would drop.

Even tears wouldn’t come, though they had burned in his eyes, so desperate to escape.

He had worked his way through every emotion he had the energy for—which wasn’t many, really—and now he crouched, again in the center of the room. He ran his hands through his short-cropped hair, whispering—or shouting; it was all the same, now—words in languages he didn’t understand. Cruel, ancient things that stole his tongue for their own purposes, their own pleas, their own recriminations.

It wasn’t his fault.

He clung to that as the voices grew wilder, sharper, cutting from his mouth with poison he was sunk too far into desolation to imbibe. He could only spit his venom on walls that needed the color, needed the intensity, needed _ anything _ but the vacant sameness they only ever held.

And then…a door opened.

True light, pure, real, finally undampened light appeared out of nowhere in the emptiness, and a figure stepped through it, shutting the door that had not existed a moment ago behind it, leaving it to seal back into the flat, featureless walls without so much as a seam.

The man fell forward, forehead against the ground, hands flat in supplication. “Please.” The word left his tongue like a stone, shattering against the ground as a thousand errant appeals. He had never been much of a praying man, but he prayed now. Anything must be better than this oblivion.

_ Anything. _

“Tell me,” a voice said, above his head, “what is it you desire?”

“I-I…” And, suddenly, the impression of his body returned to him, and he could _ feel _. Could feel the textured surface of the ground beneath his lips and palms and legs. Could feel his desperate thirst and dry tongue. Could feel his hunger, clawing in his stomach, and his exhaustion, pricking at his eyes. His fear, his sorrow, his anger—all were returned to him, and it was a gasping breath drawn after being held under the water’s surface for so very long.

“_Tell me_.” The voice was low and commanding.

The man looked up, and tears slipped wetly down his cheeks. “I’m so hungry, so thirsty, so—” He choked on his words. “Please, _ please_. I… _ Anything_.”

The figure—the _ man_—nodded and reached down to lift him to his feet.

He wiped his eyes, his nose, and stared up at his savior. “Thank y—” But the word was lost to the watering of his mouth as the man grabbed at the air and withdrew a gloriously red apple. It was blushed rose, pale yellow twisting from the stem-end, showing where the sun hadn’t been able to touch.

_ The sun. _

He’d forgotten, somehow, but now he remembered—its heat, its shine. And he could already smell the sweetness of the fruit, its gentle tartness. He wet his lips and groaned, taking the apple from the man’s hand, ignoring the shock when their fingers met. He bit, deeply, already anticipating the warmth and the honey on his tongue.

But the fruit burst as it met his lips, bathing his mouth in rot and slime, and he spat, sputtering. There was a horrible grittiness on his tongue and in his teeth and he wiped at it with his fingers as he dropped the fruit to the floor. It made a meaty thud like a punch, like a body slumping to the ground.

“Pick it up,” said the creature. And it _ was _ a creature, now, not a man, for it was grinning with far too many teeth, something dark and twisted in the depths of its eyes.

“What?” he asked numbly, still scraping the gunk from the roof of his mouth.

“There’s nothing wrong with it,” the thing said, and the man remembered, suddenly, the words from his own tongue.

“_There’s nothing wrong with it,_” he had told the people of that town, kicking at the soil he knew was contaminated, so sure of his lies.

But now he stammered. “I-I—”

The creature moved before he could react, pressing him to his knees, bending his face to the floor. “_Eat_,” it said, “or I’ll make you.”

He took the fruit from the floor and stared at it. It was perfect and plenary and held the aroma of lazy summer days, the laughter of children, the smile of a woman whose name and face he could no longer recall. But he could see the hopeful faces of the women and children he’d assured would be safe eating the food they grew.

His hands were shaking when he took another bite.

This time, it tasted of metal and pesticide, the poison corroding his lips, and he hissed, pulling away, but the creature’s clawed, roughened hand gripped him by the neck and pressed him closer to the fruit.

He took another bite.

A woman was crying. He could hear her, but he couldn’t see, not knelt as he was, a supplicant to his own guilt. “My baby, my baby,” she wept, and the apple tasted of raw meat, viscera caught in his teeth, blood running down his throat. He gagged, falling to his hands, bile rising in his throat and splattering on the floor with the fruit, granting the dullness variety, if not pleasantness.

“_Please _…” He was crying again, tears leaking from his eyes to mix with the vomit on his chin he didn’t have the strength to wipe off. “Please, stop.”

The monster chuckled. “You were given a chance to stop, weren’t you?”

He was cast into another memory. A courtroom, the crying woman, or maybe another—they had all started to blur together by the end—castigating him, spouting nonsense, blaming his company for their own failures. They would have been _ fine _ had they simply bought the water filters, or the pesticide, or the fertilizer, or any number of things generously offered by a subsidiary company.

“We get ‘em coming _ and _ going,” he used to say. Always said. Always…

_ Where was he? _

He hadn’t had the wherewithal to consider before, but what _ was _ this room, this creature? Maybe it was a dream. He clung to the thought. If it was a dream, all he had to do was wake up. All he had to do was disbelieve the nightmare.

He struggled against the beast, shuffling backward to regain his feet. “You’re not real!” he shouted, feeling adrenaline rush through his veins. “This is a dream. This is _ nothing_.”

But the creature merely chuckled again. “Do you not know where you are, human?”

“I-I’m asleep.” He remembered now. “I went to bed”—his chest had hurt, so he’d downed a couple sleeping pills with his nightly tipple—“so I’m asleep. That’s all.”

“You died,” it said flatly, tilting its head to watch his reaction. “Heart attack, if I’m not mistaken. And I rarely am.”

“And then I…?” He didn’t believe it; he _ couldn’t _ believe it.

“And then your soul, my dear sinner, was judged. And it was found wanting.”

“So-so I’m—?”

“In Hell, yes.”

“No,” he said immediately.

“No?” the thing asked with a smirk.

“I didn’t… I didn’t do anything wrong.”

The creature laughed, loudly and unrestrained. “But don’t you see? These are your works.”

“My…?”

It gestured at the fruit on the ground, at the putrefaction and the vomit and the gall. “These are your sins, you miscreant. And you _ will _ eat them.”

He attempted to evade when it lunged forward, but there was nowhere to go, nowhere to run. There was only the room, and there was only the monster. And there was only himself, with all the faces whispering their poison in his ears. He found his body pressed back to the ground, forced to his hands and knees before the fruit, and he took it in hand almost willingly, taking another bite.

This time it was as hard as stone, but he had no choice but to choke back the dust and grime, even as he could feel his teeth crack against the rock, fracturing into shards that cut further still into his flesh. Blood poured from his mouth in a torrent, and, when he coughed, he splattered the ground with streaks of ruby and dun.

“Good!” the creature crowed, grinding his face further into the fruit. “Are you getting it, now?”

The rest of the fruit turned to sludge and dripped from his hand to the floor to join the rest of the muck. He gnashed his toothless gums together, and moaned with a pain that still felt strangely detached. He spat and panted.

The beast pushed on the back of his neck until his mouth was mere inches from the swirl of fluids on the ground. “You’ve not finished your meal, though. How inconsiderate of you.”

“Wh-what?” he asked, bone fragments spilling onto the floor with his words.

“You’ve made a mess, now clean it up.”

He blinked at the puddle of rot and vomit and blood. “I-I can’t.”

“You will.”

“I’m innocent,” he pleaded, but even he wasn’t sure he believed that. Not now.

He expected a chuckle, but he received only silence in return. It was, he supposed, all he deserved. He could smell the task before him, but he could also smell the runoff from his factories polluting the rivers, and, in turn, corrupting the soil.

He exhaled slowly. “I don’t think I can do this.”

“Don’t worry”—the voice behind him was rough and mocking—“everything will be fine. It’s perfectly safe.”

He understood, then, as his own words were thrown back at him yet again, that he was never getting out of this place. And so he shut his eyes, bowed his head, and set to work. He gagged immediately, but swallowed back the vomit, ignoring the throbbing in his gums, the aching in his neck and shoulders and knees. He licked, and licked, sucking up the larger chunks, swallowing it all back.

If these were his sins, he would bear them.

With every lick, he felt a pang of guilt fall away. With every strange, slippery fragment, an anguished face disappeared from the corners of his vision. And, when he was done, and even his chin and lips had been cleansed in the purifying fires of Hell and his own repentance, there were no more voices screaming and crying and hissing their recriminations in his ears.

He had thought, in life, that he’d known true peace, in the money and the status and the _ power; _but now, he knew, it had all been specious. He had destroyed life and land for a false paradise. Only in death, then, could there be true serenity. He sat back, eyes still closed, and breathed, slowly, steadily, accepting this torture as his due, feeling it refine his soul.

When he opened his eyes, he knew the monster would be gone. And he would have this empty room, again, in which to find the truth and light he had turned away from. And there would be a finer peace than he could ever have conceived of when he was so sunk into putrefaction and deception.

He opened his eyes.

The monster was standing there, watching him. “Tell me—what is it you desire?”

And the sensations of his body were redoubled, and he could feel more than he’d ever wanted to feel. Every molecule of his skin cringed and shuddered; the horrors he had ingested roiled in his stomach, spreading their corruption down into his intestines, filling his flesh with strange growths that reached their tendrils out to every part of him. The pain he had been expecting came now, riding a wave of true torment—blinding, deafening, driving him back to his knees to curl in on himself.

“_Tell me_,” it commanded.

His whole body was on fire—what was he supposed to wish for? Death? He was already dead, and yet the agony continued. He hissed his anguish, his fingers scrambling against the ground, seeking something he didn’t understand. But a sharper pang echoed from his throat, the flames there by far the hottest, and he choked on his reply. “Water, _ please!”_

“Ah, of course,” the creature said cordially from above his head.

He felt the lip of a cup against his raw and ravaged gums, and he shivered, pressing his tongue forward to lap at the glorious elixir. It quenched the torridity in his throat, and he sighed in relief, but as the edge of comfort passed over him, the water turned to acid, and he screamed. His mouth was stripped of flesh as he tried to scramble backward, but he was stopped by a strong hand again gripping the back of his neck.

“You will drink,” the monster hissed, tipping the cup further against his mouth, and he wheezed as boiling causticity poured into his trachea, and he was drowning. The cup runneth over with pure, liquid agony, never going dry as memories did not so much creep into his mind as flood it, too many to truly comprehend, forcing him to recall every detail he’d thought lost to his supposed ‘cleansing’.

Perhaps _ this _ was the cleansing. Perhaps there was hope yet, but his thoughts were fragmented by the sensations overwhelming him, as he lost control of his body entirely and flailed against the immovable creature that fed him his gall with glee on its face. And he deserved it.

He had believed himself redeemed by the barest hint of his own sins, but now he was truly being shown them. He saw every one—every lie he told to better himself, every person he hurt through his own greed, every inch of soil and water he gladly destroyed for his own selfish gain.

He had screamed, at some point, but his vocal cords were little more than ragged viscera, now, and he was silent, hands clawing against the creature to no effect, feet kicking out at nothing. After a minute, an hour, a scant eternity he slumped; he no longer had the energy to fight something so inexorable, even by instinct. He sagged against the floor and let the thing that had been water drive deeper towards his lungs with every drop. When his eyelids slipped closed, and even the jerking of his chest stopped, the flood ceased and he was left in a heap on the ground.

He curled into the position he had woken up in with the last of his strength, still shaking. He realized, then, that he was whispering a litany from scalded and decomposing lips. “_I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry._”

There was no response.

_ “Please. I’m sorry. Please. I— Please, please. Please.” _

And, still, no response.

He had believed the monster gone once before, but surely, _ surely _ this was to be the end of his torture, at least for a time. He could not be more repentant, could not plead any more honestly for a reprieve. For mercy; for grace. He had thought himself desolate, but found a faint flickering in his heart where hope still burned, and so he opened his eyes, expecting oblivion to meet him again.

And the monster was standing there, watching him. “Tell me—what is it you desire?”

“No!” he said, instinctively. “There _ can’t _ be more!”

He was truly repentant—what else could be left?

“You think _ repentance _ is the point?” the creature asked.

He blinked. “But then what?”

He was dragged to his feet again, lifted until he could smell the beast’s breath against his face, and it held the putridity of the factory smog. He coughed, unable to catch his own breath. “Please, _ please.” _

He was on the Senate floor, now, blowing the hot air of his lies over every ear that would listen, spreading the wages of his sin in palms greased with grime, in promises of further ruin.

The creature dropped him, and the floor was covered in corpses, of insects, first, that he had promised his pollution would never harm. Then there were birds, soaked in oil and poison, maggots clinging to their feathers, wriggling between his fingers. Then fish, stinking in their thousands, scales pale from his cruelty.

And then there were squirrels, rabbits, deer, a woman—the one whose face he had forgotten, but now he could remember every cruel word he had ever spoken to her, every other woman he had rather look upon than her—eyes sunken, blood flecked against their lips.

Strangers, now; hundreds, maybe thousands, men and women, their lifeless fingers reaching for him, skin clammy and rent with corruption. And then the children came, thin and wan, their faces wracked with pain and illness. Babies, torn from wombs, broken, twisted, the blood flowing over his feet, his hands.

And, still, he couldn’t breathe. “P-p…” he tried, but his pleas were lost to his hacking cough, bringing with it bloody phlegm he spat over the rotting corpses. There was no floor left, only lifeless eyes, crimson-stained lips, and hands, still grasping even from the darkness of the grave.

He looked up, now, at the monster still watching him. He couldn’t speak, but he prostrated himself, hands clasped in prayer. _ Please, please, _ he thought, even as he felt ribs crack from the strength of the spasms in his chest, even as black spots erupted over his vision. _ Mercy. _

“Did you offer _ them _mercy?” the creature asked softly, gesturing at the skeletons that were all that was left. His feet scrambled on the bones, and he fell, cutting himself on jagged shards. And then the bones turned to thick, greasy smoke, and he choked on the acridity.

Inside, he felt his lungs burn, but every time he tried to stand, he slipped back into the noxious vapor. _ Mercy, _ was all he could think. He had no more excuses.

But the creature only laughed as the fog began to eat at his skin, wither muscle and tendon, drift between his ribs, and render his still pleading hands nothing but gnarled bone.

All of it, everything he’d ever done, was nothing more than this toxic smoke, no more substantial, no more worthwhile. Why should he receive mercy? How had he ever expected to be _ purified? _

There was nothing in him that was not corruption. And as he was, so his flesh became, rotting from his bones, dropping to the nebulous ground. He should not have had the nerves to feel the last of his blood thicken into the sludge he had once pumped into rivers, should not have known the taste of his own brain matter dripping down the caving walls of his skull, how it was sweet as mercury. He reached up, fingers scrambling past his ribs to feel the remains of his lungs, spongy as the mold he had once sworn caused no harm. Reaching deeper, feeling the husks of kidneys, liver, and spleen—organs that cleansed his body but could never cleanse his soul—as dry and twisted as the asbestos he allowed his workers to breathe, breeding the putrescence that was all he could feel, the only thing he could still cling to.

This was no mortifying pain, no flagellation he could pretend would make him better. There was no better for him to be. His chance to save his soul—to baptize himself in the spirit of cleaner waters—was over.

He deserved nothing else.

He didn’t plead mercy any longer, didn’t beg peace, though what remained of his hands was still clasped in prayer, his decaying eyes fixed on the source of his punishment. No, _ he _ was the source of his punishment; this creature was only the conduit.

They had come to an understanding, _ finally. _ Finally, he understood. He would rejoice in this pain, in all the torment he deserved. He slumped to the ground, muscles rotting, no longer having the ability to kneel. He was a pile of bones on the floor, like all the others.

He closed what was left of his eyelids, finding something like contentment in those comforting words, _ What is it you desire? _

The creature would come again, with its eyes filled with glorious hellfire, and burn the sins out of his soul. After a moment, he pressed his now intact eyelids open.

He was in an empty room—floors, walls, and ceiling gray and featureless—lit by a sourceless light, equally dull and dim.

And there was nothing.

There was nothing.

* * *

Lucifer stepped out of the room, dusted off his hands, and rolled his eyes. By all the gods humanity had ever imagined, he was bored out of his mind.

He shook his head, sighed, and moved onto the next sinner on the Devil’s docket.

**Author's Note:**

> Additional warnings: Sensory deprivation, sensory overload, blood, vomit, food horror, poison, tooth removal, forced feeding, emetophagia, Lithophagia, asphyxiation, consumption of rot, decomposition, carrion, implied/referenced child death, starvation.
> 
> Please let us know if we missed any major ones.


End file.
